For Dorothy Who Took Forever To Understand the Truth About The Ruby Slippers by KEN L. JONES

For Dorothy Who Took Forever to Understand the Truth About

The Ruby Slippers

Ken L. Jones

A constellation of stars led to all that I touched

Turning to solid gold long ago in a land of planted corn

Where I seized its pretty bird songs

And trapped them in a jewel encrusted cage

And like a stray cat shredding the vanishing dusk

I cast my gold coins of great sadness

Out over the unending sea until they

Turned into beautiful butterflies

To the tune of a singing harp that

Could also lay golden eggs when asked to by me

I want to be transformed into a beautiful swan

I want to escape past the pigsty gate

I want to enlist the four winds to fly me to a castle

That lies east of the old red barn’s drooping weather vane

But the forest is now all covered long by snow

Harsh winter guards it like some trickster tiger

And some unseen long dead Tsar has decreed

That I will never achieve all that my heart desires.

Ken L. Jones has been writing professionally for several decades. Although he has written everything from Donald Duck comic books to putting words in the mouth of Freddy Krueger in the movies he likes to think of himself first last and always as a poet.Currently he is working on a short horror movie with his son and sometimes collaborator Kevin for horror director David Todd Ocvirk. When not doing that he is also writing an insane amount of horror and other types of genre short stories and novellas and is editing three or four huge collections of his never ending flow of poetry including a volume of his much published horror work Blood Is Red which will be his second solo book of horror poetry.